The President Visits A Lost War

by Turkana

It's good that President Obama has gone to Afghanistan. There is much to see. And people have been speculating that Afghan "President" Hamid Karzai was informed only at the last minute because the White House doesn't trust him. The White House has reason not to trust him. Which isn't the only bad news out of Afghanistan. Despite some attempts to spin it otherwise, the war in Afghanistan is going the way wars in Afghanistan always go. Badly.

The number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan has roughly doubled in the first three months of 2010 compared to the same period last year as Washington has added tens of thousands of additional soldiers to reverse the Taliban's momentum.

Those deaths have been accompanied by a dramatic spike in the number of wounded, with injuries more than tripling in the first two months of the year and trending in the same direction based on the latest available data for March.

U.S. officials have warned that casualties are likely to rise even further as the Pentagon completes its deployment of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and sets its sights on the Taliban's home base of Kandahar province, where a major operation is expected in the coming months.

Of course, this followed the big offensive in Marja. Which some tried to claim was some great military triumph. Was it?

Remember Matthew Hoh? He's the former Marine, former combat troop in Iraq, former uniformed Pentagon official, former civilian official in Iraq and at the State Department, who then became the senior civilian U.S. official in Taliban hotbed, Zabul province. In other words, he is someone who knows of what he speaks. And in October, he resigned his post, in protest of the continuing war in Afghanistan. Well, he has news, as reported by the Huffington Post:

Matthew Hoh, the former senior U.S. civilian representative in Zabul province, Afghanistan, says that civilian deaths in Marjah caused by Operation Moshtarak were unnecessary and that the operation isn't accomplishing anything. Hoh points to the installation of an outsider ex-con as the head official in Marjah as evidence that despite U.S. rhetoric to the contrary, Operation Moshtarak is not empowering local people.

Blunt. To the point. How not empowering the people was the Marjah offensive? A third of the area's civilian population ended up registering as refugees. 24,000 human beings. Who had to flee their homes. And those are just the ones that actually registered. The Los Angeles Times, last month:

Since the start this month of a massive assault by U.S. Marines and British and Afghan troops on the southern Afghan town, nearly 4,000 families have sought shelter in nearby Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province. By the calculation generally used by aid agencies -- six people per family, though many are far larger -- that would add up to at least 24,000 people, nearly one-third of the town's population.

The figure takes into account only those who have officially registered as displaced; thousands of others are thought to be undocumented. Many fled with only scant possessions, hoping the fighting that erupted Feb. 13 would end quickly.

And let's just say that the strategy seems to be at cross purposes. From the New York Times:

The effort to win over Afghans on former Taliban turf in Marja has put American and NATO commanders in the unusual position of arguing against opium eradication, pitting them against some Afghan officials who are pushing to destroy the harvest.

From Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal on down, the military’s position is clear: “U.S. forces no longer eradicate,” as one NATO official put it. Opium is the main livelihood of 60 to 70 percent of the farmers in Marja, which was seized from Taliban rebels in a major offensive last month. American Marines occupying the area are under orders to leave the farmers’ fields alone.

“Marja is a special case right now,” said Cmdr. Jeffrey Eggers, a member of the general’s Strategic Advisory Group, his top advisory body. “We don’t trample the livelihood of those we’re trying to win over.”

If the U.S. Marines at Combat Outpost Turbett have any problems with their Afghan colleagues, they're with the Afghan soldiers who followed them into battle against Taliban fighters, not with the elite police officers who've stepped in to help fill the security vacuum.

While the Marines praise the Afghan National Civil Order Police force, they can barely conceal their contempt for the Afghan soldiers who live alongside the Americans in this one-time drug den in Marjah.

The greatest concern is that the shortcomings of the Afghan soldiers could undermine U.S.-led efforts to present ANCOP as the new, more respectable face of the Afghan government.

Not winning, militarily. Causing a third of the population to flee. No longer even eradicating the opium trade. The Afghan military not doing its job. And this is success?

The other big story has been the decapitation of the Taliban, via the capture of some of its top leaders, in Pakistan. But someone forgot to tell the Taliban. Newsweek:

Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, who remains in hiding and has not been seen publicly for nine years, has appointed two of his top Taliban militia commanders from the south to replace his former deputy and longtime comrade-in-arms Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar who was arrested by Pakistani forces in Karachi last month.

Abu Zabihullah, a senior Taliban operative whose has supplied accurate information to NEWSWEEK in the past, says that the one-eyed Taliban leaders has confirmed Abdul Qayum Zakir, a former Guantánamo inmate, and Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor, a portly and personable rear-echelon leader, as his deputies, replacing Baradar. Their appointments, Zabihullah says, are meant "to convey a good message that, despite our leader's arrest, the Taliban is back to business-as-usual operations without a problem."
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The choice of Zakir, who was released from Guantánamo in late 2007, and who returned to join the Taliban in the field about one year later after being freed by Afghan authorities, is popular with Taliban commanders. Several Taliban commanders have told NEWSWEEK that they wrote letters to Mullah Omar in support of Zakir as the logical replacement for Baradar soon after his deputy's arrest. The commanders favor Zakir because, unlike Baradar—who never set foot in Afghanistan since the Taliban's collapse in late 2001—he frequently visits insurgent units in the field, giving them advice and listening to their complaints. For more than a year, Zakir, who is in his mid-30s, has largely been in charge of insurgent operations in the south of Afghanistan.

Just a little irony? Iran's president president joins him for a carefully arranged state meeting, but ours rightfully doesn't trust him enough to tell him until the last minute that a meeting will be happening.

Things are not going well. Things don't go well in unwinnable wars. It doesn't matter if we have new leaders with better intentions and better ideas. Unwinnable wars are unwinnable. Six more civilians dead, in a roadside bombing, in the west. Five more civilians killed, in roadside bombings in the west. Another American troop killed. Another British soldier killed, in a suicide bombing. Hundreds of protestors, in the north, where a NATO airstrike accidentally killed seven policemen. Oops. We're just not doing so well with that old hearts and minds thing. And it's getting worse.

The White House says it will begin withdrawing troops in 2011. Afghan "President" Karzai says his military will need our troops until at least 2024. Who are we to argue?